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The US is considering providing Ukraine with cluster munitions. This follows the escalation logic of war – and horrifies those who have long campaigned to have this type of ammunition outlawed. This also includes close partners of Ukraine.
The debate over the use of cluster munitions in Ukraine is not new. Human rights organizations such as Amnesty International have been reporting for the past year that Russia has been shooting at Ukraine with the banned weapons.
Last summer, Amnesty accused the Russian armed forces of having killed numerous civilians in the city of Kharkiv through the use of cluster munitions “while they were visiting playgrounds with their children, commemorating their relatives in cemeteries, while queuing for aid deliveries or while shopping”.
According to a report by Amnesty, Russia has been using the ammunition since the beginning of the war in February 2022 – the organization considers this a war crime. The NGO Cluster Monitor Coalition writes that after the war began, at least 689 Ukrainians were killed by cluster munitions in the first half of last year alone – and there are probably still a large number of undetected bombs lying in the Ukrainian soil.
However, the Ukraine may have also used cluster munitions – from old Soviet stocks, as the specialist journalist Thomas Wiegold points out tagesschau24 said. But their quantity is limited.
Ammunition with a long-term effect
The fact that civilians in particular die or are maimed by cluster munitions, often long after the conflict in question has ended, has always been the focus of criticism of the weapons. Cluster munitions are fired from the air or from the ground using rockets or bombs that burst in mid-air. This releases many small explosive devices, which are spread over a large area so that they hit as many targets as possible. According to non-governmental organizations, there are said to be more than 200 different types of cluster munitions.
However, they often do not explode and remain a danger to people in the region as duds – also because they are not recognizable as dangerous bombs, especially for children, and can be mistaken for toys. According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, some types of cluster munitions produce up to 40 percent duds.
An agreement with many signatories…
It was therefore considered a great success that the so-called Oslo Convention was agreed in 2008 – internationally known by the abbreviation CCM (“Convention on Cluster Munition”). It prohibits the use, development, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster bombs.
States parties are also supporting countries with large areas affected by the use of cluster munitions – such as Laos and Vietnam, which are recognized as the world’s most affected by cluster munitions – decades after the end of the Vietnam War. The contracting states are also trying to convince other states to ban cluster munitions.
In the years that followed, more than 100 states joined the agreement, which came into force in 2010. Germany was one of the founding members of the CCM.
… and non-signers
However, important countries have not joined the CCM – Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Brazil and Argentina, and neither has the USA. Even in the EU, not all states have signed the agreement – Finland, Romania, Greece, Poland, Latvia and Estonia are among the non-signatories.
Some of these states, like Russia, are at war – outside or within their borders. Cluster bombs are said to have been used again and again in the Syrian civil war, especially since Russia supported the Syrian ruler Assad. And in Yemen, Saudi Arabia is said to have repeatedly used cluster munitions.
Ukraine has been pushing for a long time
Ukraine is also not a signatory state and has been pushing for months to get such weapons – because Russia uses them. Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Olexander Kubrakov said at the Munich Security Conference in February that his country was not a party to the Oslo Accords. Therefore there are no legal obstacles for his country.
Ukraine will use cluster munitions “exclusively against the armed forces of the Russian Federation,” the dpa news agency quoted the deputy prime minister as saying in February.
Yehor Cherniev, deputy and deputy chairman of the National Security Committee, made a similar statement. He pointed to Russia’s superiority in ammunition and the West’s limited capabilities – cluster bombs would be an effective antidote for Ukraine here. Ukraine would also use them differently and more specifically than Russia, which uses cluster munitions against cities and civilians.
At the security conference, however, Kubrakov was initially rebuffed. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg clarified that NATO “neither recommended nor supplied” these types of weapons and to avoid any doubt he stressed: “We supply artillery and other types of weapons, but not cluster bombs.”
“sluggish” ammunition deliveries Of the West
However, military experts like Thomas Wiegold express understanding for the Ukrainian demand. The West is delivering ammunition “more slowly” than Ukraine wants and needs, Wiegold said tagesschau24. A delivery of cluster munitions would facilitate Ukraine’s advance in the current offensive, because they could not only be used against infantry, but also against protected and armored targets such as Russian transports or convoys.
Frank Sauer from the Bundeswehr University in Munich wrote on Twitter that Putin’s war of aggression creates a dilemma. On the one hand, the use of cluster munitions by Ukraine would damage the international legal order. On the other hand, it is not reprehensible that Ukraine is making this demand because the country is struggling to survive, it is already full of mines and cluster munitions and these weapons partially compensate for Ukraine’s numerical inferiority in artillery systems and ammunition.
The talks have been going on for a long time
The US now appears ready for delivery. Talks about a delivery are said to have been going on for months, and last week Chief of Staff Mark Milley made such considerations public. The United States has been considering supplying cluster munitions “for a long time,” the AP news agency quoted Milley as saying in a speech at the national press club.
This was well received by Republicans, some of whom are skeptical about the extensive military aid to Ukraine. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said the move was long overdue.
The United States is said to have a large arsenal of cluster bombs. In a letter from US politicians to President Joe Biden last March, there was talk of up to three million units, the AP news agency writes. The US last used cluster munitions in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan in the early 2000s and at the start of the Iraq war in 2003.
Hardly any duds left?
An official decision has not yet been made. But the US Department of Defense tried to counter any criticism of the insidiousness of the weapons immediately. Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder said the United States had “several types of ammunition” in stock.
Among them are “no old variants with a rate of duds of more than 2.35 percent”. And he promised that if the US did supply these weapons to Ukraine, it would “carefully select ammunition with lower dud rates.”
The critics are not convinced. Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock rejected the delivery of cluster munitions to Ukraine and pointed out that the Oslo Agreement applies to the federal government.
The UN Human Rights Office in Geneva said the use of cluster munitions should “stop immediately” and appealed to the US and Russia to join the CCM.